Fortune 500 CEO Thasunda Brown Duckett co-chairs New York's new AI workforce commission

Thasunda Brown Duckett is now helping shape how one of America's largest states responds to artificial intelligence in the workplace. New York Governor Kathy Hochul named the TIAA president and CEO as co-chair of the FutureWorks Commission, a 20-member blue-ribbon panel charged with developing recommendations on how New York can protect workers while capturing the economic benefits of AI.

Duckett shares the co-chair role with former US Secretary of Labor Tom Perez and Molly Kinder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who leads a multi-year research project on AI's impact on work. The three will steer a commission composed of experts across technology, workforce development, education and the economy.

"Preparing our economy to contend with AI may turn out to be the defining challenge of our time," Hochul said in announcing the commission's membership on Monday.

Duckett leads TIAA, the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America, one of the largest financial institutions in the United States with approximately $1.3 trillion in assets under management and more than five million active and retired clients. TIAA was founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1918 to serve educators, and today covers researchers, healthcare professionals and government employees across the country.

She became TIAA's president and CEO in May 2021, making her one of only a handful of Black women ever to lead a Fortune 500 company at the time of her appointment. Before TIAA, she spent 17 years at JPMorgan Chase, where she served as CEO of the Consumer Bank and Auto Finance, overseeing a network with more than $600 billion in deposits and 50,000 employees. She also serves on the boards of Nike and Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights.

Under her leadership, TIAA has pushed its mission beyond higher education toward broader retirement access across America, hosting what she calls "Coffee and T" sessions with employees to maintain a direct read on culture and organizational health inside a company of that scale.

The commission's mandate is specific. It will identify real-time data strategies for monitoring AI's impact on employment, and recommend policy and private sector interventions to ensure workers and small businesses share in AI's benefits rather than absorbing its costs alone.

FutureWorks was first announced by Hochul in March 2026 during a speech at the Association for a Better New York, framed as part of the state's broader positioning as a global capital for responsible AI development. New York's appointment of a TIAA chief to co-chair the panel signals that the state sees retirement security and long-term workforce stability as inseparable from the AI transition debate.

Duckett's selection places her at the center of one of the most consequential policy conversations in American public life, where the question of who benefits from AI and who absorbs its disruptions is still wide open.